Sometimes, late at night, after I’ve had a really hard day and am in the mood for a good pity party, I get on the Internet and Google “Oreo O’s.”
I don’t do it because I find the sight of ambiguously gendered marshmallow things performing synchronized swimming within milk to be aesthetically pleasing, nor do I Google the cereal because I hope to brush up on my Korean language skills. Mostly, I Google it because reading comments about how much other peoples’ lives suck now that Oreo O’s has been discontinued makes me feel better about myself.
So you can only imagine how I felt when Internet searches began yielding strange and life-changing news earlier this summer. According to the bastion of all things verifiable and trusted (Wikipedia) Oreo O’s were going to come back into stores sometime in early August.
Message board and Ask.com chatter — leaked, supposedly, from researchers in the the top secret skunkworks of cereal development known as Post — began appearing on a nightly basis, while videos were uploaded on YouTube to promote the supposed relaunch.
Yet, like that whole 2011 apocalypse deal, the date came and went, and now, nearly two months later, I’m stuck eating regular Oreo’s and regular cereal instead of cereal that tastes like Oreos.
Like I said, life sucks.
Unless you live in Korea, where Oreo O’s are not only available, but apparently making life just totally freaking awesome for anyone lucky enough to get their hands on them. Fortunately, the holy grail of childhood cereal nostalgia and lost Saturday mornings — a box of Oreo O’s — arrived on my doorstep last week.
To a certain extent, I considered myself unworthy as I picked up the blue box with writing entirely in Korean. A serious cereal eater I may consider myself, but it shames me to say I can’t exactly remember if I ever had Oreo O’s before. I probably did at some point during those developmental years known as middle school, but thanks to a diet based almost exclusively around Golden Grahams and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I really can’t remember.
While it certainly detracts from my credibility, my relatively blank slate of completely unrealistic expectations does keep me somewhat objective. At the very least, it keeps me capable of opening the box without hyperventilating and going into cardiac arrest due to sheer excitement.
That sheer excitement kicked into full gear once I opened the box and took a whiff of pure, unadulterated Oreo smell (which I was able to confirm by also opening up a snack pack of Oreos I just so happened to have on hand for testing purposes.) The speckled rings had a solid crunch and cocoa heavy flavor only bolstered by a sweeter vanilla aftertaste which comes along with each bite.
Taking a handful of the rings and chucking them into my mouth, and then stepping back to bite into my actual Oreo, it occurred to be that this might actual be the kind of cereal which civilizations are founded on. Even the marshmallows, at first thought extraneous, have a vanilla flavor not completely dissimilar to Oreo cream, with their soft bite and slightly smooth mouthfeel doing an admirable job at filling in for said Oreo cream. Heck, if I was the kind of disgusting person who chewed up my food and swooshed it around in my mouth, I might even conclude, with authority, that the partially digested Oreo O’s cereal and an actual Oreo were one and the same.
It’s at this point that I begin to develop a midbowl crisis. Realizing this may just be the best single cereal ever constructed by the wheels of food industry, it dawns on me that my life is going to suck once I get through this box and go back to having to eat Oreos and cereal separately.
I pondered moving to Korea, but luckily, the addition of milk to my bowl makes me rethink this location change. Great as it is plain, Oreo O’s is actually just above average in milk. It’s crunchier than I’d like, but mostly, it just fails to transfer its unique cookies and cream properties to the milk, making the end-milk slurp akin to a bellyflop into the kiddie pool.
Does Oreo O’s taste like Oreos? Well, not exactly, but it tastes pretty damn close, as least much closer than Cookie Crisp tastes like an actual chocolate chip cookie or Apple Jacks tastes like an apple. The ironic – and truly heartbreaking – corollary is that both Cookie Crisp and Apple Jacks will never be discontinued, allowed to perpetuate in “kinda sorta but not really” taste equivalence while Oreo O’s may never come back to these golden shores. And that is more depressing than any long, tiring day at the office will ever be.
(Nutrition Facts – 30 grams? – 119kcal, 1.9 grams of fat, 1.3 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 115 milligrams of sodium, 24 grams of carbohydrates, 12 grams of sugar, 1.5 grams of protein)
Item: Post Oreo O’s Cereal with Marshmallows (Korea)
Purchased Price: $13.98
Size: 500 grams
Purchased at: eBay
Rating: 10 out of 10
Pros: Tastes remarkably like an actual Oreo. Rings have good cocoa flavor and stay crunchy in milk. Chewed up and swooshed around in your mouth, might just be identical to an Oreo (hypothetically speaking) Presumably healthier for me than an actual Oreo. Bridging the cultural gap one one cereal bowl at a time.
Cons: Unverifiable internet rumors that ruin peoples’ lives. Ambiguously gendered white things. Not available in America. Leaves average end-milk. Bellyflopping into the kiddie pool. Feeling crappier about myself than I did before. Not for twisters.